Berlin's road towards a connected future.

This project was commissioned and supported by Technologiestiftung Berlin (Berlin Technology Foundation).

The project highlights Berlin's efforts to prepare the city for its digital future. It is built upon data from the Broadband Atlas as well as data from the Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure. The project illustrates the progress in extending highspeed broadband access throughout Berlin, based on data covering the last five years. The visual comparison of city districts and their progress, once again, brought to light that there are still slight differences between West- and East-Berlin. The districts in the former east still have to catch up with the development in the west. Especially in East-Berlin's outskirts in the north we find areas with limited highspeed broadband access.

We also transformed data from the Broadband Atlas and mapped it onto building blocks in order to give citizens a high-resolution image of the current situation in Berlin. The interactive map allows for an open data exploration.

50Mbit/s availability mapped on Berlin building blocks.

One hour of geolocated tweets and images on Instagram across Berlin.

Beyond highlighting wired and wireless broadband in Berlin, we tried to give some examples of the variety of data that is piped through the digital infrastructure. Therefore, we analysed publicly available tweets and images posted on Instagram, as well as their locations. To protect the privacy of individuals we did not focus on individual items, but tried to paint a landscape and show where most of tweeting and instagramming happens. Obviously, central Berlin plays an important role, but even in more remote places we see a lot of Twitter and Instagram activity throughout the day.

The visual highlight is an interactive three-dimensional representation of broadband access across Berlin.

24 hours of tweets, images on Instagram, and broadband data.

3D visualization of broadband access in Berlin.

As the digital infrastructure is an important driving force behind the digital economy, the projects tried to illustrate the progress Berlin has made, and also the long road ahead. Highspeed broadband access, similar to electricity, is mostly taken for granted and only noticed in times of shortage and outage. The visualization hopes to bring this invisible infrastructure into focus and thereby also foster the discussion on future extensions for an equal access to broadband internet across the whole city.

The data and all the code written to build these visualizations is available in a repository provided by the Technology Foundation on GitHub: